THE ORANGE AND THE GREEN Paint and Architecture By Jon Astbury
In 2001, the Dutch architectural firm MVRDV completed a building for Thonik, an Amsterdam-based graphic design studio. It was a cheap project, a simple two-storey block, clad in polyurethane and then painted in one of the studio’s favourite colours — and the Dutch national colour — orange. More accurately, a searing, hazard orange. This was both something of an advert for the studio, a means of publicity for the smallest budget — coverage to achieve coverage, so to speak — and also an attempt to emphasise “plasticity” in the way lurid paint, and its very nature as a painted-on, applied surface will still conjure images of
cheapness, of rubber and plastic. Studio Thonik’s orange, however, was not to last. It certainly drew coverage, but primarily due to the complaints it received: one neighbouring resident c laimed that MVRDV ’s particular shade of orange “injures the mind”, so seriously had he felt the effects of basking in its glow. Similar responses from more locals led to a slightly token-feeling public consultation — as told by Jacob van Rijs in an interview with Sandra Karina Löschke: “these are the ten colours we selected; if you pick three, which in your opinion are the best ones, I can then